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Zig 0.11

ziglang.org

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Re: Zig 0.11

#91

Post by pjmlp »

TheRoque wrote: post #43
grumpyprole wrote: post #23

Zig is not memory safe and therefore at risk, just like C/C++, of future government legislation that outlaws the use of memory unsafe languages for some or all projects. The risk of such legislation is not insignificant: https://www.itpro.com/development/programming-languages/3694... Personally I do not see the point of building an entirely new language and ecosystem that does not fully address this issue.

What would happen with existing codebases, sometimes built upon 2 decades of C or C++? Will the we "rewrite everything in Rust" ? lol

No, we will Rewrite in ChatGPT (or similar), and only architect jobs and the few AI druids that write the tooling will be safe.

Re: Zig 0.11

#92

Post by anonymoushn »

msavara wrote: post #7

Anybody here who is using zig on daily basis?

We trade ten million dollars a day of shitcoin derivatives using zig. Should be more soon :). We're probably stuck on 0.10.1 until async makes it back in though.

Re: Zig 0.11

#93

Post by graboid »

0xfedbee wrote: post #60
grumpyprole wrote: post #23

Zig is not memory safe and therefore at risk, just like C/C++, of future government legislation that outlaws the use of memory unsafe languages for some or all projects. The risk of such legislation is not insignificant: https://www.itpro.com/development/programming-languages/3694... Personally I do not see the point of building an entirely new language and ecosystem that does not fully address this issue.

[flagged]

Where did he/she even mention Rust?

Re: Zig 0.11

#94

Post by pjmlp »

iraqmtpizza wrote: post #61
Cloudef wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who used C as main language, I've switched to zig. It's the only language that tries to be "better C", and not another C++. Comptime being like Nim where it's not entirely own language is also plus. I'd say it excels at general purpose system programming, and especially if you need to work with memory in detailed way (rust makes this very annoying and hard).

I thought Go tried to be better C

It kind of is, for anyone without bias against languages that have a GC.

However they could at least support some kind of enumerations, one of the things they definitly aren't a better C.

Re: Zig 0.11

#95

Post by pjmlp »

cztomsik wrote: post #78
tarcio wrote: post #5

What are the use cases for zig? The website says general purpose and tool chain but people who have used it, what it excels at?

1. It's typically at least as fast as C, unlike C++/Rust 2. You can do type introspection (and switching) during compile-time, and it's not just some stupid TokenStream transformer, you really have type information available, you can do if/else on the presence of methods, etc. 3. There are no generics, but your functions can accept anytype, which is still type-safe. See https://github.com/ziglang/zig/blob/9c05810be60…

> 1. It's typically at least as fast as C, unlike C++/Rust

The typical urban myth that never comes with profiler proofs.

Re: Zig 0.11

#96

Post by johnisgood »

grumpyprole wrote: post #23

Zig is not memory safe and therefore at risk, just like C/C++, of future government legislation that outlaws the use of memory unsafe languages for some or all projects. The risk of such legislation is not insignificant: https://www.itpro.com/development/programming-languages/3694... Personally I do not see the point of building an entirely new language and ecosystem that does not fully address this issue.

And they have not even mentioned Ada/SPARK... right.

Re: Zig 0.11

#97

Post by ArtixFox »

grumpyprole wrote: post #42
quic5 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is absolutely true. But but you can write memory-bug-free code in Zig but you cannot prevent heap allocations in most of the languages listed in the article, making it outright impossible to write certain software in them.

Sure one can write memory-bug-free code in x86 assembly too. But how can you prove it? ATS is an example of a low-level systems language where you can prove it.

formalized subsets of x86 assembly exist. Coq can be used as a macro assembler. tools to work with llvm ir exist, x86 can be raised up to llvm ir and proved, kinda bad way tho.

Re: Zig 0.11

#98

Post by ArtixFox »

grumpyprole wrote: post #35
bachback wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

seriously? "The National Security Agency (NSA) has recommended only using 'memory safe' languages, like C#, Go, Java, Ruby, Rust, and Swift, in order to avoid exploitable memory-based vulnerabilities."

Yes seriously. The west is getting hacked and owned on a daily basis. The NSA recommendation shows that governments are starting to identify where the problem is.

ah yes the east! The lovers of memory safety. West is getting hacked daily because every country is getting hacked daily.

Re: Zig 0.11

#99

Post by johnisgood »

grumpyprole wrote: post #34
quic5 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That totally misses the point of quality software. What good is memory safety if you medical device crashes because of an out of memory error? What I'm trying to say: There are use cases where areas of safety are required other than memory safety.

Memory safety is one aspect of quality yes, but is there any evidence Zig is a good fit for other quality aspects, e.g. static analysis tooling and correctness proofs? ATS is a low-level language that allows embedded proofs of correctness in the type system.

That article does not even mention Ada/SPARK... So much for safety. :P Yup, there is static analysis with Ada/SPARK and it is great. It is much more general-purpose than ATS, and there are other things in Ada/SPARK that increases safety in general, not only memory safety.

For what it is worth, Ada/SPARK has a strong presence in safety-critical domains like aerospace and medical devices, while Rust is gaining popularity in system programming and web development. ^^ I'm surprised that it is not as widespread. That, or lots of misconceptions.

Re: Zig 0.11

#100

Post by ArtixFox »

grumpyprole wrote: post #81
0xfedbee wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

You might think that, if you live in a small world. I want memory safety, but I am otherwise not a big fan of Rust. Rust tries to be too high-level like C++, making it opaque where allocations are happening. For a low-level systems language, with embedded proofs, I quite like ATS, but Vale is also promising and more like Zig.

The way zig is designed, I think it will be fairly easy to embed Ada's Spark like proof system in it.
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